hackiLab

How do Onion Routing and Tor Work?

Onion routing was originally developed to protect the communications of the US government’s intelligence, but later became world-famous for helping civilians resist government surveillance.

In 1997, Michael G. Reed, Paul F. Syverson, and David M. Goldschlag first invented onion routing at the US Naval Research Laboratory [13]. Afterwards, Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson started to develop Tor at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the first version of Tor was released in 2003 [14]. In 2004, the US Naval Research Laboratory open-sourced Tor under the terms of the free software license. Since then, Tor has been funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2006, the non-profit organization “The Tor Project” was established to maintain Tor until today.

Tor [15] is an implementation of onion routing. It not only improves the defects in the original design such as the circuit constructing mechanism, but also adds some components that are not in the original design, such as directory server and onion service, making the system more robust and more anonymous.

Tor has been deployed by more than 7,000 volunteers since its launch in 2004 and is already a powerful tool for anonymity. However, this also makes it a double-sided blade: on the one hand it can help the whistleblower to expose the lawlessness and confront the surveillance; however, it also promotes criminal activities such as drug trafficking and smuggling. But no matter what, the ingenuity of the technology itself is the focus of this article.

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